


Empty Shells

by Secret Staircase (elwing_alcyone)



Category: Zero: Tsukihami no Kamen | Fatal Frame IV: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse
Genre: Gen, Horror, Missing Scene, Psychic Abilities
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-30
Updated: 2015-12-30
Packaged: 2018-12-17 23:06:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,615
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11861523
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elwing_alcyone/pseuds/Secret%20Staircase
Summary: Misaki arrives at Rougetsu Hall, meets Sakuya, considers Kageri, and learns well from her elders the Way of the Creepy Doll.





	Empty Shells

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the BCL Christmas Exchange 2015.

Her first week at Rougetsu Hall, Misaki was scared. The room was bigger than her room at home, full of strange shadows after dark, and so hot she couldn't sleep. Whenever she met the man across the hall, he'd scowl at her and mutter things she didn't understand, and sometimes in the middle of the night he would scream. The other rooms along the corridor were uninhabited — at least, one was just for paintings, and the other one was locked. There might be somebody living in the locked room, she supposed. Someone living very quietly, only creeping out at night. That first week, she lay awake, listening hard for the click of a lock, the stealthy dragging of limbs. When the man across the hall started screaming, Misaki almost screamed too.

But after the first week she started to get used to it, and was less afraid, more bored. For all his glaring and grumbling, the old man never came near her. She started to hate the sound of his hoarse voice in the night, bellowing at nothing. She tried to be friends with the boy who lived on the next floor down, until he stole one of the important things she'd brought from home. He gave it back when she accused him, but Misaki wouldn't look at him after that.

There was no one else to talk to. She lay on the bed kicking her feet against the wall above her pillow, since nobody ever came to stop her. Between kicks, she listened, not with her ears.

Yuukou Magaki — it wasn't his real name, but she couldn't hear the one underneath — thought in colours and shapes that made her head hurt. The paintings he made were always humming in tune with his moods. The empty room was really empty, after all, but in another room she hadn't known about, a woman lay in a narrow space, living and dead at the same time.

Downstairs, Kazuto Amaki turned over a handful of someone else's jewellery with glee. Yoriko Sonohara had got a rope and kept twisting it. The nurses were anxious and tired, with their heads full of numbers and chores. Misaki heard the numbers clearest of all, because the nurses went to so much trouble to remember them.

Above, there was a changing light, like before an autumn storm when the clouds are always passing before the moon. Someone without a name, singing to herself, and ripples of pure white light spread out with the song. Misaki listened, and felt that person listening back.

That night, when Magaki started to scream and the nurses came running, Misaki slipped out of her room. Nobody saw her. There was a key on the desk at the nurse's station; it was a key for the elevator. She picked it up as she went.

Less than a minute later she was standing on the fourth floor landing. It smelled like dust up here, and some sort of decay, not a ripe, rotting, living decay but something drier, crumbling. Paper, wood, stiff old cloth. The door was locked, but the numbers were echoing in her ears.

The corridor went on for so long she wondered if this were a dream, one of those dreams where familiar buildings sprouted mazes of rooms she'd never seen before. It was very dark and close, with vines growing over the high windows. She thought about the unknown woman on the floor below, sleeping in that enclosed space, arms stiff at her sides.

The hall ended at a door. There was a limbless doll on a table next to it, and spots of brown on the floor that didn't come off when Misaki scuffed her toe over them.

From behind the door, a sweet voice called softly, as if she'd knocked: "Come in."

Misaki didn't move. A moment later, the door was opened from within. Moonlight washed the hall, and silhouetted against it was a woman. She looked like a ghost in her white gown, with her hair loose and uncombed.

Then she stooped; the moon was behind her, and Misaki could see her face, her kind smile. For no reason she could think of, it made her want to cry.

"It's late for you to be up," the woman said, her face on a level with Misaki's. "Couldn't sleep?"

Misaki shook her head.

"You'd better come in, then," the woman said, taking Misaki's hand. In the bright, pure blue of the moon, everything was visible. The woman's name was Sakuya, and Misaki felt calm, knowing that. Sakuya knew her name as well.

"We're the same," Sakuya said, leading her into a glass room where the moon shone straight in through a net of vines. The floor was cool tiles, smooth against Misaki's bare legs when she knelt beside Sakuya. In one corner, a flower in a pot was blooming, white and fragrant.

"Do you feel lonely?" Misaki said in wonder. It had never quite occurred to her that adults might feel lonely too; she had thought it was something you grew out of.

"There's somebody I miss," Sakuya said. "You're a little like her, only you're you." She stroked Misaki's hair lightly, which made her scalp tingle. "Stay here until you feel sleepy, okay?"

It was quiet here, far from the shouting of Yuukou Magaki. The shadows the moonlight made were like velvet, not at all threatening. Above, the moon... the moon...

* * *

Madoka came, then Ruka did, and Misaki wasn't so lonely any more. She still liked Sakuya best, but they couldn't see each other very often. The nurses were always catching Misaki and sending her back to her room, but some of them were thinking how much better she seemed since she and Sakuya met.

Misaki felt better. At night she could listen for her friends: Ruka in the next room, soft and low like a piano string resonating. Below, Madoka whispered to her canary. And Sakuya...

Usually, when Misaki listened for her, everything got clearer. Old memories showed themselves again. But then there would come the times when she listened and heard nothing but an empty sound, like a radio between stations. Sakuya's name would change, or disappear into a void. At times like that Misaki felt how easily she too might disappear.

On one of those days, dark and restless, she sat at lunch with Madoka and Ruka. A rare wind was rattling the windows in their frames.

"It's going to storm, I think," Ruka said, watching the scudding clouds outside.

Misaki didn't care if it stormed or not. What did it matter, when they weren't even allowed to play outside? "Let's get away and explore somewhere. The nurses aren't watching us, look."

Ruka didn't refuse — perhaps the stormy weather had made her restless, too — and Madoka wouldn't stay behind if the other two were going. If they stuck to the back of the room, behind the screens, nobody would notice them.

They'd already been all over the ground floor, even in the storage room under the stairs; Misaki had a feather from the stuffed peacock's tail under her pillow. The code for the second floor had been changed two days ago, so nobody knew it yet. Third floor, then. There was still that room on the other side of the building, where the woman with black clothes stayed. Every day she came out for her walk, sweeping into the elevator with that red wheelchair she liked to push around. Misaki had only ever caught glimpses of the figure sitting in it, and the feeling she got was... strange. Ever since she'd stopped being afraid, she'd wanted to see what sort of room a person like that might live in.

She was half expecting to be caught out in the elevator hall and marched back to the dining room in disgrace. But no one was there to see the three girls darting up the stairs, and after that the thrill of the forbidden took over, freedom and danger, which were nearly the same thing. They had to tiptoe past the little nurse's station on the second floor landing, in case one of the nurses should be there, but no one was. By the time they reached the third floor landing, Madoka was fighting nervous giggles, and it wasn't long before all three of them were laughing wildly. They piled through the door to the unexplored corridor and had to stop there, holding onto each other.

It took a while to be able to see anything. Like the hall that led to Sakuya's room, the windows were covered with vines, and the day was getting darker. Madoka was already beginning to think longingly of the bright, busy dining room, so Misaki pulled herself together and stepped out in front.

"Come on," she whispered. "Let's be quick."

But when they reached the other end of the corridor, even she didn't quite have the nerve to open the door. Ruka pressed her ear to it and listened solemnly. Madoka kept glancing back down the long, gloomy hall. Misaki looked down at the floor and saw something red just next to her foot. It made her think of the old brown stains on the floor before Sakuya's room. They had been red once, too.

For a dizzying moment she felt herself two people, in two places — one, Misaki, stood before the door to Room 311, and the other, a stranger, before Sakuya's. One of the doors was swinging open — which? She felt herself — not herself — step forward into sunlight — bright morning sunlight, so it had to be a different day. The air was breathlessly still. She was aware of something hard and narrow clenched in her hand.

"Here," Misaki heard a voice say, shrill and desperate. "Is this what you want? Is this what you keep calling me for? You monster!"

She stepped closer to the shadow on the bed. Sakuya held a doll in her lap and smiled. It was the same calm, kind smile, and yet, underneath...

The voice gave a little hysterical laugh. "Who are you? Who _are_ you? Nobody's in there! That's it, right? Nobody! You're nobody!"

Footsteps in the corridor. Misaki — no, not Misaki, the other woman — gave a hasty glance over her shoulder.

"They won't let me kill you," she said, her voice sinking, growing flat. "But I can do this."

She lifted her hand. Something caught the light, and there was a terrible pain in her neck. Red sprayed everywhere. Sakuya watched, smiling.

Misaki took a step back and bumped into Madoka. The doubling, the memory, ended. The thing on the floor was a rose petal, not a splash of blood. Now she thought of it, the whole corridor smelled sweet, like perfume.

"Nobody's in there," Ruka said, looking at Misaki. It took her a moment to realise Ruka meant the room. Of course, this had been her idea, so they would expect her to go first. _Just a peek,_ she told herself. The vision had left her shaken, and the feel of the door handle was horribly like the handle of a knife. She expected the door to make an ominous creak, like in a horror film, but it opened inward without a sound.

The light within was strangely warm and flickering. Candlelight, from a dozen tall red candles set in tarnished silver candelabra. A pale woman, quite bald, stood before a red wheelchair, and gazed at Misaki vacantly. She had no arms, no legs. She hung above the ground, motionless, staring.

"It's a mannequin," Misaki said. She had seen the post it was mounted on. The quick succession of fear and relief made her daring, and she opened the door wider. The sweet flowery smell was even stronger in here; the floor was strewn with red roses. The centrepiece of it all was a coffin on a cloth-covered platform.

It was a real coffin. Misaki stared hard, but there was nothing else it could be. Nothing else was exactly that shape.

And Ruka had been wrong. Someone was in here. It was in that coffin with its arms at its sides. Something with strange, dead, grasping thoughts, like the withered roses on the floor whose thorns could still draw blood. Something turned its mind, its will, its blank face, towards her.

The mannequin moved — she was sure of it, no trick of the uncertain light — and at the same moment, the curtain along the far wall shivered. A hand was drawing it back.

Misaki sprang away from the door, letting it slam.

"Quick, quick!" she cried, shoving Ruka and Madoka ahead of her along the corridor. "She's there! She's coming!"

Against all reason the laughter came back as they ran, bubbling up like the fear. Just as they reached the end of the hall, Misaki heard a door open behind them, and wondered who was standing there in the gloom, staring out.

* * *

Weeks later, she had a dream. It wasn't even a bad dream, not really. There weren't any monsters stalking her, nothing jumping out; nobody died or anything. Even so, she was almost grateful when Mr. Magaki's screams woke her.

She dreamed she was in Sakuya's room, though of course Sakuya wasn't there now. It was just an empty room, with moonlight slanting in from the windows, but from the door she could see something in the greenhouse that wasn't supposed to be there. Walking closer, she saw it was a coffin, standing up on its end.

The dream was full of a sense of dread, and yet Misaki herself wasn't frightened. She felt quite calm as she went up to the coffin. She knocked on the front of it, and from the dull sound, she could tell something was inside.

So she opened the lid. Out came a drift of red flowers, and the air was full of their choking sweetness. They were all over the floor, all around her feet, and still more were crammed inside the coffin, so she had to scrape them out by the handful to see what was underneath.

It was Miya. Her eyes were open, like the vampires in the stories, and her skin was bone-white. Simultaneously Misaki realised she was the one who had left Miya in the dark all this time. They had been in the coffin together.

She didn't sleep again that night. She put a pillow along the bottom of the door, so the nurses wouldn't see her light, and sat up with Miya. Outside, the half moon was just disappearing around the side of the building. It had grown from a crescent as thin as a white petal, and when it was full, they'd all go to the festival together.

"I'll see big sister then," she told Miya. "Ruka and Madoka can meet her. And we'll all get better, and we'll go to the lighthouse."

_And we'll always be together._

"Mm."

Across the hall Mr. Magaki ranted on and on. His paintings felt like people tonight. The building was full of people who weren't really there; Mr. Magaki's paintings, and the man behind the wall on the second floor, and Sakuya's dolls, and the one in the coffin, sleeping with her eyes open. Misaki held Miya tighter and tried not to hear them all. She only had to wait until the festival. Everything would be better then.

* * *

And on the night of the festival, someone came to take her away. She went under the ground, down and down. There was a place where the light was as broken as she was.

For ten years she was down there, calling to herself, _Come back, come back,_ as all the other voices died away.


End file.
